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Wednesday, 20 December 2017

(This is the fourth part of my essay entitled NEOLIBERALISM AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. See the blog for the previous three parts.)

Structural Exploitation under the Neoliberal Social Contract

Structural exploitation - “a property of institutions or systems in which the “rules of the game”
unfairly benefit one group of people to the detriment of another”https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/ - has been an incontrovertible reality of all class-based societies from the
establishment of the earliest city-states in Mesopotamia until the present. Usually but not always intertwined with social oppression, structural
exploitation entails a relationship of social dominance of an elite group over
the rest of society subordinated for the purpose of economic, social,
political, and cultural exploitation. Legitimized by the social contract,
justifications for institutional exploitation include safety and security of
country, eliminating impediments to progress, and emulating nature’s
competitive forces that exist in the animal kingdom and reflect human nature.

From
Solon’s laws in 6th century BC Athens until our contemporary
neoliberal era, social contract theory presumes that the state is the catalyst
for social harmony if not fairness and not for a privileged social class to
exploit the rest of society. No legal system has ever been codified that
explicitly states its goal is to use of the state as an instrument of
exploitation and oppression. In reality however, from ancient Babylon when King
Hammurabi codified the first laws in 1780 B.C. until the present when
multinational corporations and wealthy individuals directly or through
lobbyists exert preponderate influence in public policy the theoretical
assumption is one of fairness and justice for all people as a goal for the
social contract.

In the age
of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – biotechnology, nanotechnology, quantum
computing, and artificial intelligence – presumably to serve mankind as part of
the social contract rather than to exploit more thoroughly and marginalize a
large segment of humanity, the persistence of structural exploitation and
oppression challenges those with a social conscience and morality rooted in
humanist values to question what constitutes societal progress and public
interest. Liberal and Christian-Libertarian arguments about free will
notwithstanding, it has always been the case that mainstream institutions and
the dominant culture indoctrinate people into believing that ending exploitation
by changing the social contract is a utopian dream; a domain relegated to
poets, philosophers and song writers lacking proper grounding in the reality of
mainstream politics largely in the service of the dominant socioeconomic class.
The paradox in neoliberal ideology is its emphasis on free choice, while the
larger goal is to mold the subjective reality within the neoliberal
institutional structure and way of life. The irreconcilable aspects of
neoliberalism represent the contradictory goals of the desire to project
democratic mask that would allow for popular sovereignty while pursuing capital
accumulation under totalitarian methods. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_contractarianism.html’ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2017/05/15/indoctrination-and-free-will/

Social cooperation becomes dysfunctional when
distortions and contradictions within the system create large-scale social
marginalization exposing the divergence between the promise of the neoliberal
social contract and the reality in peoples’ lives. To manage the dysfunction by
mobilizing popular support, the political elites of both the pluralist and the
authoritarian-populist wing operating under the neoliberal political umbrella
compete for power by projecting the image of an open democratic society. Intra-class
power struggles within the elite social and political classes vying for power distracts
from social exploitation because the masses line behind competing elites
convinced such competition is the essence of democracy. As long as the majority
in society passively acquiesces to the legitimacy of the social contract, even
if in practice society is socially unjust, the status quo remains secure until
systemic contradictions in the political economy make it unsustainable. https://mises.org/library/profound-significance-social-harmony

In the last three centuries, social
revolutions, upheavals and grassroots movements have demonstrated that people
want a social contract that includes workers, women, and marginalized groups
into the mainstream and elevates their status economically and politically. In
the early 21st century, there are many voices crying out for a new
social contract based on social justice and equality against neoliberal
tyranny. However, those faint voices are drowned against the preponderate
neoliberal public policy impacting every sector while shaping the individual’s
worldview and subjective reality. The triumph of neoliberal orthodoxy has
deviated from classical liberalism to the degree that dogmatism
‘single-thought’ process dominates not just economics, not just the social
contract, but the very fabric of our humanity.

Under neoliberalism, “Uberization” as a way of life is
becoming the norm not just in the ‘financialization’ neoliberal economy resting
on speculation rather than productivity but in society as well. The neoliberal
ideology has indoctrinated the last two generations that grew up under this
system and know no other reality thus taking for granted the neoliberal way of
life as natural as the air they breathe. Often working two jobs, working
overtime without compensation or taking work home just to keep the job has
become part of chasing the dream of merely catching up with higher costs of
living. People have accepted perpetual work enmeshed with the capitalist
ideology of perpetual economic growth perversely intertwined with progress of
civilization. The corporate ideology of “grow or die” at any cost is in reality
economic growth confined to the capitalist class, while fewer and fewer people
enjoy its fruits and communities, cities, entire countries under neoliberal
austerity suffer.

The incentive for conformity is predicated on the belief that the benefits
of civilization would be fairly distributed if not in the present then at some
point in the future for one’s children or grandchildren; analogous to living a
virtuous life in order to enjoy the rewards after death. As proof that the
system works for the benefit of society and not just the capitalist class,
neoliberal apologists point to stock market gains and surprisingly there is a
psychological impact – the wealth effect – on the mass consumer who feels optimistic
and borrows to raise consumption. Besides the fact that only a very small
percentage of people on the planet own the vast majority of securities, even in
the US there is no correlation between stock market performance and living
standards. (John Seip and Dee Wood Harper, The Trickle Down Delusion, 2016)

If we equate the stock market with the ‘wealth of the nation’, then in 1982
when the S & P index stood at 117 rising to 2675 in December 2017, the
logical conclusion is that living standards across the US rose accordingly.
However, this is the period when real incomes for workers and the middle class
actually declined despite sharp rise in productivity and immense profits
reflected in the incomes gap reflected in the bottom 90% vs. the top 10%. This
is also the period when we see the striking divergence between wealth
accumulation for the top 1% and a relative decline for the bottom 90%.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/upshot/income-inequality-united-states.html; https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality/

A research study compiled by the pro-organized labor non-profit think tank ‘Economic Policy Institute’ stresses
the divergence between productivity and real wages. While the top 0.01% of
America’s experienced 386% income growth between 1980 and 1914, the bottom 90%
suffered 3% real income drop. Whereas in 1980 income share for the bottom 90%
stood at 65% and for the top 1% it stood at 10%, by 2014 the bottom 90% held
just half of the income, while the top 1% owned 21%. This dramatic income
divergence, which has been shown in hundreds of studies and not even neoliberal
billionaires deny their validity, took place under the shift toward the full
implementation of the neoliberal social contract. It is significant to note
that such income concentration resulting from fiscal policy, corporate subsidy
policy, privatization and deregulation has indeed resulted in higher
productivity exactly as neoliberal apologists have argued. However, higher
worker productivity and higher profits has been made possible precisely because
of income transfer from labor to capitalist.http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/; https://aneconomicsense.org/2015/07/13/the-highly-skewed-growth-of-incomes-since-1980-only-the-top-0-5-have-done-better-than-before/

“Real hourly compensation of production,
nonsupervisory workers who make up 80 percent of the workforce, also shows pay
stagnation for most of the period since 1973, rising 9.2 percent between 1973
and 2014.Net productivity grew 1.33 percent each year between 1973 and
2014, faster than the meager 0.20 percent annual rise in median hourly
compensation. In essence, about 15 percent of productivity growth between 1973
and 2014 translated into higher hourly wages and benefits for the typical
American worker. Since 2000, the gap between productivity and pay has risen
even faster. The net productivity growth of 21.6 percent from 2000 to 2014
translated into just a 1.8 percent rise in inflation-adjusted compensation for
the median worker (just 8 percent of net productivity growth).Since 2000, more
than 80 percent of the divergence between a typical (median) worker’s pay
growth and overall net productivity growth has been driven by rising inequality
(specifically, greater inequality of compensation and a falling share of income
going to workers relative to capital owners).Over the entire 1973–2014 period,
rising inequality explains over two-thirds of the productivity–pay divergence.” (Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, "Understanding
the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Pay Why It
Matters and Why It’s Real" in Economic
Policy Institute, 2015,http://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-why-its-real/

The average corporate tax rate in the
world has been cut in half in the last two decades from about 40% to 22%, with
the effective rate actually paid lower than the official rate. This represents
a massive transfer of wealth to the highest income brackets drained from the
working class. More than half-a-century ago, American anthropologist Jules
Henry wrote that: “The fact that our
society places no limit on wealth while making it accessible to all helps
account for the ‘feverish’ quality Tocqueville sensed in American
civilization.”Culture Against Man (1963). The myth that the neoliberal policies
in the information age lead toward a society richer for all people is readily
refuted by the reality of huge wealth distribution gaps resulting from
‘informational capitalism’ backed by the corporate welfare state.

Capital accumulation not just in the
US but on a world scale without a ceiling has resulted in more thorough
exploitation of workers and in a less socially just society today than in the
early 1960s when Jules Henry was writing and it is headed increasingly toward
authoritarian models of government behind the very thin veneer of meaningless
elections. Against this background of unfettered neoliberalism, social
responsibility is relegated to issues ranging from corporate-supported
sustainable development in which large businesses have a vested interest as
part of future designs on capital accumulation, to respecting lifestyle and
cultural and religious freedoms within the existing social contract. (Dieter
Plehwe et al. eds., Neoliberal Hegemony, 2006; Carl Ferenbach and Chris Pinney, “Toward
a 21st Century Social Contract” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance,
Vol. 24, No 2, 2012; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-6622.2012.00372.x/abstract

At its Annual conference in 2017 where
representatives from the ‘Fortune 500’, academia, think tanks, NGOs, and
government, business consultancy group BSR provided the following vision under
the heading “A 21st Century Social Contract”: “The nature of work is changing very
rapidly. Old models of lifelong employment via business and a predictable
safety net provided by government are no longer assured in a new demographic,
economic, and political environment. We see these trends most clearly in the
rise of the “gig economy,” in which contingent workers (freelancers,
independent contractors, consultants, or other outsourced and non-permanent
workers) are hired on a temporary or part-time basis. These workers make up
more than 90 percent of new job creation in European countries, and by 2020, it
is estimated that more than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce will be in
contingent jobs.” https://bsr17.org/agenda/sessions/the-21st-century-social-contract

Representing multinational corporate
members and proud sponsors of sustainable development solutions within the
neoliberal model, BSR applauded the aspirations and expectations of today’s
business people that expect to concentrate even more capital as the economy
becomes more ‘UBERized’ and reliant on the new digital technology. Despite fear
and anxiety about a bleak techno-science future as another mechanism to keep
wages as close to subsistence if not below that level as possible, peoples’ survival
instinct forces them to adjust their lives around the neoliberal social contract.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531726/technology-and-inequality/

Reflecting the status quo, the media indoctrinate people to behave as
though systemic exploitation, oppression, division, and marginalization are
natural while equality and the welfare of the community represent an anathema
to bourgeois civilization. What passes as the ‘social norm’, largely reflects
the interests of the socioeconomic elites propagating the ‘legitimacy’ of their
values while their advocates vilify values that place priority on the community
aspiring to achieve equality and social justice. (Robert E. Watkins, “Turning
the Social Contract Inside Out: Neoliberal Governance and Human Capital in Two
Days, One Night”, 2016).

The neoliberal myth that the digital technological revolution and the ‘knowledge based
economy’ (KBE) of endless innovation is the
catalyst not only to economic growth but to the preservation of civilization
and welfare of society has proved hollow in the last four decades. Despite
massive innovation in the domain of the digital and biotech domains,
socioeconomic polarization and environmental degradation persist at much higher
rates today than in the 1970s. Whether in the US, the European Union or
developing nations, the neoliberal promise of ‘prospering together’ has been a
farce. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tsq.12106/full; http://www.ricerchestoriche.org/?p=749

Neoliberal
myths about upward linear progress across all segments of society and
throughout the world notwithstanding, economic expansion and contraction only
result in greater capital concentration. “The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a
database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, pulled out all
43,060 multinational corporations and the share ownerships linking them to
construct a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding
networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure
of economic power. The model revealed a core of 1318 companies with
interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other
companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they
represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively
own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and
manufacturing firms, the “real” economy, representing a further 60 per cent of
global revenues. When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found
much of it tracked back to a super-entity of 147 even more tightly knit
companies (all of their ownership was held by other members of the
super-entity) that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.
“In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per
cent of the entire network.” https://weeklybolshevik.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/imperialism-and-the-concentration-of-capital/http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf.

With each passing recessionary cycle of
the past four decades working class living standards have retreated and never
recovered. Although the techno-science panacea has proved a necessary myth and
a distraction from the reality of capital concentration, considering that
innovation and technology are integral parts of the neoliberal system, the media,
politicians, business elites, corporate-funded think tanks and academics
continue to promote the illusive ‘modernist dream’ that only a small segment of
society enjoys while the rest take pride living through it vicariously. (Laurence Reynolds and Bronislaw
Szerszynski, “Neoliberalism and
technology: Perpetual innovation or perpetual crisis?”

Rooted in militarism and police-state
policies, the culture of fear is one of the major ways that the neoliberal
regime perpetually distracts people from structural exploitation and oppression
in a neoliberal society that places dogmatic focus on atomism. Despite the
atomistic value system as an integral part of neoliberalism, neoliberals
strongly advocate a corporate state welfare system. Whether supporting
pluralism and diversity or rightwing populists, neoliberals agree that without
the state buttressing the private sector, the latter will collapse. Author of Liberalism
in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (2007) David Ciepley argues in “The Corporate Contradictions of
Neoliberalism” that the system’s contradictions have led to the
authoritarian political model as its only option moving forward.

“Neoliberalism
was born in reaction against totalitarian statism, and matured at the
University of Chicago into a program of state-reduction that was directed not
just against the totalitarian state and the socialist state but also (and
especially) against the New Deal regulatory and welfare state. … It is a
self-consciously reactionary ideology that seeks to roll back the status quo
and institutionalize (or, on its own understanding, re-institutionalize) the “natural”
principles of the market. … But the contradiction between its individualist
ideals and our corporate reality means that the effort to institutionalize it,
oblivious to this contradiction, has induced deep dysfunction in our corporate
system, producing weakened growth, intense inequality, and coercion. … And when
the ideological support of a system collapses—as
appears to be happening with neoliberalism—then
either the system will collapse, or new levels of coercion and manipulation
will be deployed to maintain it. This appears to be the juncture at which we
have arrived.” https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/corporate-contradictions-neoliberalism/

Adhering to a tough law-and-order policy, neoliberals have legalized
large-scale criminal activity perpetrated by capitalists against society while
penalizing small-scale crimes carried out mostly by people in the working class
and the marginalized lumpenproletariat.
Regardless of approaches within the neoliberal social contract, neoliberal
politicians agree on a lengthy prison sentences for street gangs selling
narcotics while there is no comparable punishment when it comes to banks laundering
billions including from narcotics trafficking, as Deutsche Bank among other mega banks in the US and EU; fixing rates
as Barclays among others thus
defrauding customers of billions; or creating fake accounts as Wells Fargo, to say nothing of banks
legally appropriating billions of dollars from employees and customers and
receiving state (taxpayer) funding in times of ‘banking crises’. Although it
seems enigmatic that there is acquiescence for large scale crimes with the
institutional cover of ‘legitimacy’ by the state and the hegemonic culture, the
media has conditioned the public to shrug off structural exploitation as an
integral part of the social contract.http://theweek.com/articles/729052/brief-history-crime-corruption-malfeasance-american-banks; https://www.globalresearch.ca/corruption-in-the-european-union-scandals-in-banking-fraud-and-secretive-ttip-negotiations/5543935

Neoliberalism’s reach does not stop with the
de-criminalization of white-collar crime or the transfer of economic policy
from the public sector to corporations in order to reverse social welfare
policies. Transferring sweeping policy powers from the public to the corporate
sector, neoliberalism’s tentacles impact everything from labor and environment
to health, education and foreign policy into the hands of the state-supported
corporate sector in an effort to realize even greater capital concentration at
an even greater pace. This has far reaching implications in peoples’ lives
around the world in everything from their work and health to institutions
totalitarian at their core but projecting an image of liberal democracy on the
surface. (Noam Chomsky and R. W. McChesney, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, 2011; Pauline
Johnson, “Sociology and the Critique of
Neoliberalism”European Journal of
Social Theory, 2014

Comprehensive to the degree that it aims to diminish the state’s role by
having many of its functions privatized, neoliberalism’s impact has reached
into monetary policy trying to supplant it with rogue market forces that test
the limits of the law and hard currencies. The creation of cryptocurrencies
among them BITCOIN that represents the utopian dream of anarcho-libertarians
interested in influencing if not dreaming of ultimately supplanting central
banks’ role in monetary policy is an important dimension of neoliberal
ideology. Techno-utopians envisioning the digital citizen in a neoliberal
society favor a ‘gypsy economy’ operating on a digital currency outside the
purview of the state’s regulatory reach where it is possible to transfer and
hide money while engaging in the ultimate game of speculation. (https://btctheory.com; Samuel
Valasco and Leonardo Medina, The Social Nature of Cryptocurrencies,
2013)

Credited as the neoliberal prophet whose work and affiliate organizations
multinational corporations funded, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek favored
market forces to determine monetary policy rather than having government in
that role working behind central banks. Aside from the fact that central banks
cater to capital and respond to markets and no other constituency, Hayek’s
proposal (The Denationalization of
Money, 1976) was intended to permit the law of the ‘free market’ (monetary
speculation) determine policy that would impact peoples’ living standards.
Hence capital accumulation would not be constrained by government regulatory
measures and the coordination of monetary policy between central banks. In
short, the law of unfettered banking regulation would theoretically result in
greater economic growth, no matter the consequences owing to the absence of
banking regulatory measures that exacerbate contracting economic cycles such as
in 2008.www.voltaire.org/article30058.html)

In December 2017, the UK and EU warned that cryptocurrencies are used in
criminal enterprises, including money laundering and tax evasion. Nevertheless,
crypto-currency reflects both the ideology and goals of capital accumulation of
neoliberals gaining popularity among speculators in the US and other countries.
Crypto-currency fulfills the neoliberal speculator’s dream by circumventing the
IMF basket of reserved currencies on which others trade while evading
regulatory constraints and all mechanisms of legal accountability for the
transfer of money and tax liability.

Indicative of the success of the neoliberal ideology’s far reaching impact
in economic life cryptocurrencies’ existence also reflects the crisis of
capitalism amid massive assaults on middle class and working class living
standards in the quest for greater capital concentration. In an ironic twist,
the very neoliberal forces that promote cryptocurrencies decry their use by
anti-Western nations – Iran, Venezuela, and Russia among others. The criticism
of anti-Western governments resorting to cryptocurrencies is based on their use
as a means of circumventing the leverage that reserve currencies like the
dollar and euro afford to the West over non-Westernnations. This is only one of a few
contradictions that neoliberalism creates and undermines the system it strives
to build just as it continues to foster its ideology as the only plausible one
to pursue globally. Another contradiction is the animosity toward crypto-currencies
from mainstream financial institutions that want to maintain a monopoly on
government-issued currency which is where they make their profits. As the
world’s largest institutional promoter of neoliberalism, the IMF has cautioned
not to dismiss cryptocurrencies because they could have a future, or they may actually
‘be the future’. https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-unlimited-potential-lies-in-apolitical-core/; http://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-imf-christine-lagarde/

After the
“Washington Consensus” of 1989, IMF austerity policies are leverage to impose
neoliberal policies globally have weakened national institutions from health to
education and trade unions that once formed a social bond for workers aspiring
to an integrative socially inclusive covenant in society rather than
marginalization. The IMF uses austerity policies for debt relief as leverage
to have the government provide more favorable investment conditions and further
curtail the rights of labor with everything from ending collective bargaining
to introducing variations of “right-to-work” laws” that prohibit trade unions
from forcing collective strikes, collecting dues or signing the collective
contract. Justified in the name of ‘capitalist efficiency’, weakening organized
labor and its power of collective bargaining has been an integral part of the
neoliberal social contract as much in the US and UK as across the rest of the
world, invariably justified by pointing to labor markets where workers earn the
lowest wages. (B. M. Evans and S. McBride, Austerity: The Lived
Experience, 2017; Vicente Berdayes, John W.
Murphy, eds. Neoliberalism, Economic Radicalism, and the Normalization of Violence,
2016).

Although many in the mainstream media took notice of
the dangers of neoliberalism leading toward authoritarianism after Trump’s
election, a few faint voices have been warning about this inevitability since
the early 1990s. Susan George, president of the Transnational Institute, has
argued that neoliberalism is contrary to democracy, it is rooted in Social
Darwinism, it undermines the liberal social contract under which that people
assume society operates, but it is the system that governments and
international organization like the IMF have been promoting.

“Over the
past twenty years, the IMF has been strengthened enormously. Thanks to the debt
crisis and the mechanism of conditionality, it has moved from balance of
payments support to being quasi-universal dictator of so-called
"sound" economic policies, meaning of course neo-liberal ones. The
World Trade Organisation was finally put in place in January 1995 after long
and laborious negotiations, often rammed through parliaments which had little
idea what they were ratifying. Thankfully, the most recent effort to make
binding and universal neo-liberal rules, the Multilateral Agreement on
Investment, has failed, at least temporarily. It would have given all rights to
corporations, all obligations to governments and no rights at all to citizens.
The common denominator of these institutions is their lack of transparency and
democratic accountability. This is the essence of neo-liberalism. It claims
that the economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way around.
Democracy is an encumbrance, neo-liberalism is designed for winners, not for
voters who, necessarily encompass the categories of both winners and losers.”

Those on the receiving end of neoliberalism’s Social Darwinist orientation
are well aware of public policy’s negative impact on their lives but they feel
helpless to confront the social contract. According to opinion polls, people
around the world realize there is a huge gap between what political and
business leaders, and international organizations claim about institutions designed
to benefit all people and the reality of marginalization. The result is loss of
public confidence in the social contract theoretically rooted in consent and
democracy. “When
elected governments break the "representative covenant" and show
complete indifference to the sufferings of citizens, when democracy is
downgraded to an abstract set of rules and deprived of meaning for much of the
citizenry, many will be inclined to regard democracy as a sham, to lose
confidence in and withdraw their support for electoral institutions.
Dissatisfaction with democracy now ranges from 40 percent in Peru and Bolivia
to 59 percent in Brazil and 62 percent in Colombia. (Boron, “Democracy or Neoliberalism”,http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR21.5/boron.html)

Not just in developing nations operating under authoritarian capitalist
model to impose neoliberal policies, but in advanced countries people recognize
that the bourgeois freedom, democracy and justice are predicated on income.
Regardless of whether the regime operates under a pluralistic neoliberal regime
or rightwing populist one, the former much more tolerant of diversity than the
latter, the social contract goals are the same. In peoples’ lives around the
world social exploitation has risen under neoliberal policies whether imposed
the nation-state, a larger entity such as the EU, or international
organizations such as the IMF. Especially for the European and US middle class,
but also for Latin American and African nations statistics show that the
neoliberal social contract has widened the poor-rich gap.

In a world where the eight wealthiest individuals own
as much wealth as the bottom 50% or 3.6 billion people, social exploitation and
oppression has become normal because the mainstream institutions present it in
such light to the world and castigate anyone critical of institutionalized
exploitation and oppression. Rightwing populist demagogues use nationalism,
cultural conservatism and vacuous rhetoric about the dangers of big capital and
‘liberal elites’ to keep the masses loyal to the social contract by faulting
the pluralist-liberal politicians rather than the neoliberal social contract.
As the neoliberal political economy has resulted in a steady rising income gap
and downward social mobility in the past three decades, it is hardly surprising
that a segment of the masses lines behind rightwing populist demagogues walking
a thin line between bourgeois democracy and Fascism.

Seizing power from sovereign states, multinational corporation are pursuing
neoliberal policy objectives on a world scale, prompting resistance to the
neoliberal social contract which rarely class-based and invariably
identity-group oriented manifested through environmental, gender, race,
ethnicity, gay, religious and minority groups of different sorts. Regardless of
the relentless media campaign to suppress class consciousness, workers are
aware that they have common interests and public opinion studies reveal as
much.(Susan George, Shadow
Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are seizing Power, 2015)

According to the Pew Research center, the world average for satisfaction
with their governments are at 46%, the exact percentage as in the US that ranks
about the same as South Africa and much lower than neighboring Canada at 70%
and Sweden at 79%. “Publics around the globe are generally unhappy with the functioning of
their nations’ political systems. Across the 36 countries asked the question, a
global median of 46% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with the way their
democracy is working, compared with 52% who are not too or not at all satisfied.
Levels of satisfaction vary considerably by region and within regions. Overall,
people in the Asia-Pacific region are the most happy with their democracies. At
least half in five of the six Asian nations where this question was asked
express satisfaction. Only in South Korea is a majority unhappy (69%).

As confounding as it appears that elements of the disillusioned middle
class and working class opt either for the exploitation of pluralist neoliberalism
or the exploitation and oppression of rightwing populism expressed somewhat
differently in each country, it is not difficult to appreciate the immediacy of
a person’s concerns for survival like all other species above all else. The
assumption of rational behavior in the pursuit of social justice is a bit too
much to expect considering that people make irrational choices detrimental to
their best interests and to society precisely because the dominant culture has
thoroughly indoctrinated them. It seems absurd that indirectly people choose
exploitation and oppression for themselves and others in society, but they
always have as the dominant culture secular and religious indoctrinates them
into accepting exploitation and oppression. (Shaheed Nick Mohammed, Communication
and the Globalization of Culture, 2011)

Throughout Western and Eastern Europe rightwing political parties are
experiencing a resurgence not seen since the interwar era, largely because the
traditional conservatives moved so far to the right. Even the self-baptized
Socialist parties are nothing more than staunch advocates of the same
neoliberal status quo as the traditional conservatives. The US has also moved
to the right long before the election of Donald Trump who openly espouses
suppression of certain fundamental freedoms as an integral part of a
pluralistic society. As much as in the US and Europe as in the rest of the
world, analysts wonder how could any working class person champion demagogic
political leaders whose vacuous populist rhetoric promises ‘strong nation” for
all but their policies benefit the same socioeconomic elites as the neoliberal
politicians. (J. Rydgren (Ed.), Class
Politics and the Radical Right, 2012)

Rooted on classical liberal values of the Enlightenment, the political and
social elites present a social contract that is theoretically all-inclusive and
progressive, above all ‘fair’ because it permits freedom to compete, when in
reality the social structure under which capitalism operates necessarily
entails exploitation and oppression that makes marginalization very clear even
to its staunchest advocates who then endeavor to justify it by advancing
theories about individual human traits.

In 2012 the United States spent
an estimated 19.4% of GDP on such social expenditures, according to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based industrial
country think tank. Denmark spent 30.5%, Sweden 28.2% and Germany 26.3%. All of
these nations have a lower central government debt to GDP ratio than that of
the United States. Why the United States invests relatively less in its social
safety net than many other countries and why those expenditures are even at
risk in the current debate over debt reduction reflect Americans’ conflicted,
partisan and often contradictory views on fairness, inequality, the role and
responsibility of government and individuals in society and the efficacy of
government action. Rooted in value differences, not just policy differences,
the debate over the U.S. social contract is likely to go on long after the
fiscal cliff issue has been resolved.” http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/01/15/public-attitudes-toward-the-next-social-contract/

The
neoliberal model of capitalism spewing forth from core countries to the
periphery and embraced by capitalists throughout the world has resulted in
greater social inequality, exploitation and oppression, despite proclamations
that by pluralist-diversity neoliberals presenting themselves as remaining true
to ‘democracy’. The tilt to
the right endorsed at the ballot box by voters seeking solutions to systemic
problems and a more hopeful future indicates that some people demand exclusion
and/or punishment of minority social groups in society, as though the
exploitation and oppression of ‘the other’ would vicariously elevate the rest
of humanity to a higher plane. Although this marks a dangerous course toward
authoritarianism and away from liberal capitalism and Karl Popper’s ‘Open
Society’ thesis operating in a pluralistic world against totalitarianism, it
brings to surface the essence of neoliberalism which is totalitarian, the very
enemy Popper and his neoconservative followers were allegedly trying to
prevent. (Calvin Hayes, Popper, Hayek and the Open Society,
2009)

"A
gripping, passion-filled, and suspenseful tale of love, betrayal,
political and religious intrigue, this novel entices the reader’s
senses and intellect beyond conventions. Slaves to Gods and Demons
takes the reader through a roller coaster enthralling journey of
personal trials and triumphs of a family emerging vanquished and
destitute after World War II.

Narrated by a young boy, Morfeos, modeled after the Greco-Roman pagan
deity of sleep and dreams, the book reveals the soul of a people trying
to ascertain and assert their identity while rebuilding their lives and
recapturing the glory of a lost civilization.

Seeking liberation from restraints of time, social conventions, and
binding traditions, the deity of dreams provides the conformist and the
free-spirited characters in the novel with venues for redemption that
are mere paths toward illusions. Exploring the complexities of human
relationships shaped by priest and politician alike, the novel rests on
the central theme that life is invariably a series of illusions, some
of which are euphoric, most horrifying, all an integral part of daily
existence.

Striving for purpose amid life’s absurdities after the destruction of
western civilization in two global wars, the characters in Slaves to
Gods and Demons struggle between holding on to the glory and grandeur of
a pagan legacy and the Christian present shaped by contemporary
secular events in Western Civilization."